Now that both the heads and wallets of New Year’s Eve revelers have been cleared, it’s time to focus on a task that can be more painful than a hangover: crafting New Year’s resolutions.
We at @work can’t make you stick to a vow to manage your career better in 2012, but we can help you come up with as many ways as you can handle to pursue that goal.
We polled some big-time career experts about what they’d tell workers and job seekers alike to help them supercharge their work lives, and the advice was varied and plentiful. From creating a bond of trust to testing your assumptions, here’s a pack of New Year’s resolutions designed to help you get straight and fly right in 2012.
expand your circle Meet new people. If I had to name the single characteristic shared by all the truly successful people I’ve met over a lifetime, I’d say it is the ability to create and nurture a network of contacts. So make a positive effort to make new friends this year. Look for gatherings of people whose interests match yours, and network. Then find a creative way to stay in touch. There’s no better way to improve your life.
— Harvey Mackay, speaker and bestselling author, most recently of “The Mackay MBA of Selling in the Real World”
Stop second-guessing Don’t confuse motivation with follow- through. Motivation is in the mind, follow-through is in the practice.
The mind is essential to motivation, but with follow-through it’s the mind that gets in the way. We’ve all experienced our mind sabotaging our aspirations. You decide you need to speak more in meetings, but when you’re sitting in the meeting you think, “I’m not sure what I’m going to say really adds value.”
If you want to follow through on something, stop thinking. Make a decision about something you want to do — “I will say at least one thing in the next meeting” — and don’t question it. Then when your mind starts to argue with you — and I guarantee it will — thank it for its thoughts, smile and then just ignore it.
— Peter Bregman, leadership consultant and author, “18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done”
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